If You Have Not Contemplated Murder Then You Have Never Been in Love

I hated her for playing with my emotions.

—As I drove along listening to the radio, I heard a commercial featuring the comedian Chris Rock, and the sound bite said. “if you have never contemplated murder, then you have never been in love”. I thought to myself OMG that’s what happened to me, I was in love.

Over a period of weeks and months I was emotionally hijacked, because I couldn’t erase the feeling of wanting to see her hurt as much as she had hurt me. I thought about all kinds of things happening to her, and none of them was good, at one point I even felt I understood why people would physically harm someone that had betrayed them, how else were they supposed to get any kind of satisfaction?

She was emotionally hijacked by me wanting to build a happily ever after life for us.

As someone who has studied and trains and consults on the effects of emotional intelligence, and how it works, I know that not just some, but all our decisions are based on emotions. We make an emotional decision before we make a rational decision.

What that means is that we cannot control the fact that we make decisions based on emotions, but what it does mean is that we can control how we react or to what extent we allow our emotions to dictate our actions, and for a period of weeks, and months I was in a battle between reacting based on my emotional state of mind, or allowing rationality to take control.

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How could she have done this to me? I thought we were building something together, and then just out of the blue she decided to end it. What was supposed to happen to all my dreams of happily ever after? What about the house with the white picket fence, two point five kids, and a dog?

Of course, being an emotional intelligence consultant, I know that things don’t just happen. She didn’t just decide to end the relationship out of the blue, this was something that had been building for a while, I just didn’t recognize or better yet I refused to see the obvious signs that she was planting all around me. I was too busy building our happily ever after home with the white picket fence, while she was looking for someone else to build her happily ever after with.

What I realized was that I was never a part of her happily ever after plan, I realized I was just a rest stop along her journey, however I didn’t take it that way, I set up shop as if she was going to be there forever, and I should have just treated her as someone who was just passing by for the night, and not someone who was staying for life.

The problem I was facing was that for the period of time that she stopped in my life I gave her all of me emotionally, and she made me feel as if she was giving the same, even though I always knew that I was exposing a lot more of me than she was of her. She kept her emotions hidden in a safe place, and I put mine out on full display to be manipulated.

She never wanted what I wanted, why didn’t she just tell me? I would have taken it for what it was and not gotten so deep emotionally. Why did she have to play with my emotions? I hated her for that.

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I have been trained in controlling my emotions, most people have not had this specialized area of training, in fact we are emotionally hijacked numerous times throughout our day, and most people are not able to recognize their emotional state of being at the time, and the secret to controlling our emotions and not doing things that we might later regret is being able to be aware of what emotional state we are in at the time, be aware of it, and know that what we are thinking is being decided on our current emotional state, and not rationality.

I was able to control those emotions of wanting to harm her for what I perceived she had done to me, when in actuality she hadn’t done anything to me, because I was the one that decided to invest in her emotionally to the level that I did, she did not force me, she didn’t even ask me, and in fact in one conversation after the break up, she actually said that to me, and furthermore she went on tell me that she never wanted any of that.

It’s funny, not like Chris Rock kind of funny, but she was emotionally hijacked by my emotions. We are affected by the emotions of the people we surround ourselves with, and we take on their emotional traits, and before we know it we are acting, doing and saying things that we would not normally do or say. She was emotionally hijacked by me wanting to build a happily ever after life for us. That’s what I wanted, and she adopted that behavior from me.

Your emotions are not always your own, at least not dictated by what you are directly experiencing. If you are witnessing someone go through a horrifying experience you may become scared even though you are not the one that is going through the experience. She was hijacked by my emotions of wanting the happily ever after, and what would have been a better outcome was if I had been emotionally hijacked by her just wanting to use me as just a rest stop along her journey, and I would never have fell in love with her, because that was not what she wanted.——Photo Credit: Getty Images

About Cliff Townsend

Cliff Townsend shares strategies and techniques that will improve the primary areas of your life. Financially-Physically-Emotionally, and in today's inter-connected world, Socially. Cliff has used these secrets to transform his own life. Today Cliff shares these strategies and techniques through his writing, speaking and coaching.

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